Energy News Beat

Sea levels around Japan remain stable since the 1800s where tide gauges aren’t affected by land subsidence or uplift.

​

In a region of the world where tidal gauges are not compromised by land subsidence or uplift, sea levels have not been observed to be rising since measurements began in 1894. [emphasis, links added]

According to a new study, when sea levels rise it usually has more to do with declining land movement (subsidence) or 20- to 60-year oscillations than it has to do with thermostatic sea level change.

“In Japan, there are many long-term trend tide gauges recording the sea levels since 1894. The tide gauges of Hosojima, Wajima, Tonoura, and Oshoro, not suffering from subsidence or isostasy, show multi-decadal fluctuations of periodicity quasi-20 and quasi-60 years, but not rising, nor accelerating, relative sea levels.”

Another study published earlier in the year by the same author (Boretti, 2024) indicates the sea level pattern around Japan is similarly occurring around the Polynesian island of Tuvalu.

Sea level changes are said to be influenced more by multi-decadal oscillations and land subsidence than by a global change in the amount of water stored in ocean basins.

“The significant increase in sea level observed at Tuvalu’s current tide gauge is attributed more to multidecadal oscillations, significantly affecting short-term records, and the subsidence of the tide gauge, rather than the global thermostatic contribution.”

“The suggested analysis aligns with prior research, reinforcing the perspective that the sea levels are gently rising and the surfaced area of Pacific islands and atolls is not diminishing, contrary to inaccuracies found in selective studies that emphasize certain data while disregarding others.”

Read more at No Tricks Zone

The post New Study: Sea Levels Around Japan Haven’t Risen Or Accelerated Since 1800s appeared first on Energy News Beat.

Energy News Beat

Republicans are eager to slash electric vehicle tax credits even as they struggle to coalesce around a strategy for a major tax and spending bill.

​

Republicans are eager to slash electric vehicle tax credits even as they struggle to coalesce around a strategy for a major tax and spending bill. [emphasis, links added]

The EV credit tops the list of green subsidies enacted via the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed by former President Joe Biden, which Republicans are looking to ax through reconciliation, a budget process that allows bills to bypass the filibuster and pass with only a simple majority in the Senate.

GOP lawmakers “will repeal a lot” of the EV tax credits, Rep. Michael Rulli (R-OH) told the Washington Examiner.

“Originally, when we looked at it, I think it was a really interesting way of looking at the future,” Rulli said. “But I think the market always dictates what’s going to be bought. And if the market’s not dictating EVs, we have to go back to combustion.”

President Donald Trump has long criticized subsidies for EVs and said they will destroy the auto industry. Republicans argue that the tax credits distort the market.

The IRA provides a $7,500 tax credit for purchasing a new electric vehicle. Some commercial EVs also benefit from the tax credits.

The legislation also provides a credit of up to $4,000 for those who purchase qualified used electric vehicles.

“I’m for the federal government not getting involved in the market,” Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL) told the Washington Examiner. “If there’s a market for EVs, it’ll work out. If there’s not, we shouldn’t be subsidizing EVs.”

Daren Bakst, the director of the Center for Energy & Environment at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, said there is wide support among conservatives to get rid of all EV credits.

For other green measures created or expanded by the IRA, such as subsidies for advanced manufacturing or clean energy, there is GOP support.

That is largely because the incentives have helped with projects in Republican districts.

But Bakst argued that Republicans should not take a “scalpel approach” when it comes to the IRA but rather cut as broadly as possible into the climate and clean energy provisions, which are estimated to cost $1 trillion between 2022 and 2031, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School budget estimate.

“The default assumption is that we are getting rid of the [credits], and you better make a super compelling case … to actually keep any type of credits,” Bakst said.

Yet all efforts to end IRA subsidies are getting caught up in House Republicans’ failure to make progress in deciding how much and where to cut spending.

The House Budget Committee was expected to mark up a budget resolution this week but it was delayed due to disagreements. Republicans need to agree on a budget resolution to move forward in the reconciliation process.

Democrats defend the credits not only on environmental grounds but also as a way to stay ahead of the global competition.

Read rest at Washington Examiner

The post GOP Move To Slash EV Tax Credits, Challenge Biden’s Green Subsidies appeared first on Energy News Beat.

Energy News Beat

China is fighting back, but other countries will struggle to respond.

​

Q&A

How Trump’s Tariff Policy Will Shape the World

China is fighting back, but other countries will struggle to respond.

By Cameron Abadi, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy, and Adam Tooze, a columnist at Foreign Policy and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Sign up for Adam’s Chartbook newsletter here.

Commercial trucks cross the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge border crossing into the United States in Niagara Falls, Canada, on Feb. 4. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

• 
  Economics
  

• 
  United States
  

• 
  China
  

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  Cameron Abadi
  

February 7, 2025, 4:01 PM Comment iconView Comments ()

Prefer to listen? To hear this entire conversation, and more episodes in the weeks ahead, follow Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy is at once clearer, and harder to get a handle on, than it was when he took office. Trump has made a flurry of tariff threats against Canada and Mexico that have since been postponed. But he has also imposed a sweeping 10 percent tariff on products—added atop previous tariffs imposed during the Biden and first Trump administrations—imported to the United States from China.

Are the motivations of the various advocates for tariffs consistent with one another? Is the creation of economic pain the fundamental point of tariffs? And what can the world do to counteract Trump’s tariff threats?

U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policy is at once clearer, and harder to get a handle on, than it was when he took office. Trump has made a flurry of tariff threats against Canada and Mexico that have since been postponed. But he has also imposed a sweeping 10 percent tariff on products—added atop previous tariffs imposed during the Biden and first Trump administrations—imported to the United States from China.

Are the motivations of the various advocates for tariffs consistent with one another? Is the creation of economic pain the fundamental point of tariffs? And what can the world do to counteract Trump’s tariff threats?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: The advocates for tariffs who have coalesced around Trump in recent years have motivations that are potentially in tension with one another. On one hand, there are industrial policy goals focused on building specific industries up in the United States. And then there are calls for the creation of a “bounded market” in the United States. Are these philosophies consistent with each other?

Adam Tooze: Yeah. I mean, if you wanted to make them in tension with one another, you could say that one way of thinking about the difference is whether or not you trust yourself to identify winners. Advocates of industrial policy believe that it’s incumbent on policy to attempt to pick winners, to identify sectors that matter, and to promote them. And you can do that by tariffs. And classically, this would be an infant-industry-type argument that was widely adopted in the U.S. in the 19th century. So in this country it has a real historical legacy. It’s been widely adopted in the developing world, sometimes very successfully, sometimes less so. The risk, of course, is that if you build an infant industry safety net, if you like, then the industries never graduate to being really competitive. But if you believe in economies of scale and regional economies and learning by doing and all of that good stuff that Paul Krugman and his generation of trade economists taught us in the ’80s and ’90s, then you believe in the possibility of seeding economic growth and industrial concentrations and efficiency— we’ve talked about this in so many different episodes of this show over time—and then you watch it grow. But you really do have to believe in your ability to pick winners, to identify what those sectors are. And you have to believe that the U.S. has the wider infrastructure, whether it’s in solar cell manufacturing or in chip manufacturing, to support such a push. And it’s a high bar. So that’s one line of argument and that’s, I think, really quite bipartisan at this point.

The other line of argument is to say, well, I’m not going to make choices, I don’t believe I can or I don’t believe I should, but I can say that I think the existing state of things has been rigged to the disfavor of domestic producers over importers of foreign goods and consumers who get those cheap foreign goods, and that reduces their cost of living, and furthermore, I think that this state of affairs systematically rigs the struggle, which I acknowledge between different, you might call it politely, stakeholders in the capitalist game—or once upon a time we would have called it different classes—it rigs it in favor of capital, which can go anywhere in the world and can employ whoever against labor. And in an optimal case—this is Oren Cass’s argument—when capitalism is good, when we should support it, that struggle between capital and labor is kind of win-win. Businesses have an interest in having highly skilled, highly motivated workforces and, of course, workers have an interest in being paid well and developing their skills. And in win-win situations, he describes it as people being closed in a room and needing to find a bargain. And if you open the room and let other people in, then it becomes much more difficult to broker that bargain. And that’s his account of globalization. He thinks of globalization as having fundamentally undermined the conditions for a healthy capitalism. And that is a kind of nice, ironic twist, right, because everyone who was a kind of committed ideologue of capitalism was in favor of globalization, and he’s arguing that really they’re in contradiction with each other. And so what you need to do in that case is just shift in general the trade-offs between importers and exporters, between domestic production and foreign production, and create the conditions within the United States or any other society for a better deal between capital and labor.

And I think the pushback there will be to say, “Right, OK, that’s really compelling and quite a nice story; it’s just, is that really a reasonable description of what’s happened in the United States since, I don’t know, take your pick, since the 1960s?” When was the last time you thought American capitalism functioned well in a holistic sense? And I think most people looking at the globalization story would say, “Of course it’s happened, but relatively speaking, America is not a highly globalized society.” The entire story is of an increase of 10 percent of GDP, of, you know—the share of imports in GDP in the United States was 5 percent in the 1960s, which you would think of as Great Society, kind of holistic American capitalism working well to the American middle class as well, and it’s now 15 percent. So, that’s a 10 percent shift at the same time as America’s GDP has grown fivefold. So the distribution or the redistributional element of that import shock is really, it’s just not that large, right? The most dramatic estimates of the so-called China shock are, shall we say, 3 million jobs lost. America’s workforce is over 160 million, so we’re talking about small percentages. And there may be a demonstration effect, of course. There are certain sectors which have been very badly damaged, certain regions. You could say this spreads fear and changes the terms of the conversation.

But I think the pushback has got to be, “Look, Oren, this is a great argument. This is really, you know, this is smart conservatism, no doubt, but I just don’t think the quantitative shift would explain it.” If something has gone wrong in the bargain between American capital and American labor, which it surely has, why point the finger at globalization? And why not ask yourselves what domestic policy choices were made in that period which made globalization, when it happened, as painful as it was? Is this protectionist thing that you’re arguing for really just eyewash, just window dressing? The fundamental shift in the balance of power, which has happened, you see it in all of the data, is really a domestic story. So that would be the knock on that side of the argument.

CA: Whatever the specific goals are, can tariffs only work by creating some kind of domestic disruption? Either supply chains need to be disrupted or prices need to rise as the birth pangs of whatever new order is trying to be created—and so isn’t the pain, to some extent, the point of the tariffs?

AT: Yes. I think that’s an absolutely clear and helpful analysis. And it’s two types of pain. One is that in the new equilibrium, you want there to be redistribution, and you want to redistribute from those who benefit from the existing global setup to a new set of beneficiaries. And what you’re effectively saying is you’re going to take something away from American consumers. If you went down the capital controls route, we’re going to take a great deal away from Wall Street, and what we’re going to do is favor Americans as workers. And that would be a redistributive strategy. And the policy will only succeed if you actually bring that about. So some people will suffer pain, some people will suffer benefit. And this is the logic of structural adjustment over time.

And liberal economics in the 19th century, when the changes were much, much more dramatic—like the things we’re talking about structurally now are tiny, little shifts, a few percentage points here or there, whereas in the 19th and early 20th centuries, we were talking about the de-ruralization of the world, right? Americans stopped being farmers, moved to the cities, took service and industrial jobs on a huge scale. And in Europe it was even more so. And Europeans and then Asians, of course, migrated to the United States in huge numbers. So massive, convulsive, hugely complex trade-offs. And then there is also, quite aside from that, there are sunk costs in the existing system. So building a supply chain is expensive; it requires investment. And some of those will no longer be relevant in the new era.

Like China, for instance, did a lot of work to shift its supply chains to the United States into Vietnam and Mexico. The Vietnam case is really extraordinary. Vietnam now has a larger trade surplus with the United States than Germany. And if you think that’s because Vietnam did it, I think, you know, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. Like, that’s clearly Chinese business relocating to Vietnam and using Vietnam as an export base. So if now the Trump administration moves to impose serious sanctions on Mexico, and it’s a big if, that diversion strategy will have paid off for a few years, but, you know, the bluff will now be called. So, yes, there is a real cost. And the administration, I mean, it’s just engaging in its wishful thinking when it says, “No, no, no, no. This will be good for everyone all the time.” It’s silly.

If you do our best guess of the math, you know, how big are these effects, one of the things that one again and again concludes from trade modeling is that the costs and the benefits are not huge. They’re real, and they will hit certain communities very hard, as in the case of the China shock. If you were in the business of making sweatshirts, you got destroyed by Chinese imports in the early 2000s. But obviously they’re a tiny part of the U.S. economy. So it’s real, it’s pervasive effects, but they are incrementally, relatively small unless you get into the territory of really bonkers kind of tariffs. But in certain supply chains, they will really, really disrupt them. So the North American auto industry, as it’s currently set up, cannot deal with a 20 percent, 25 percent levy on trade between Mexico and Canada because any given motor vehicle sold in the United States, all its parts cross those boundaries, the number that people quote is eight times. So every single time they cross, they would be subject to this tariff, which would just escalate the prices in an absurd way. That supply chain can be rejigged, but if the policy was imposed immediately, without any kind of concessions, it would have a paralyzing effect.

CA: What would it mean for the rest of the world to cooperate against the United States and its economic power here? Is it conceivable that other states could find ways of cooperatively coercing a change in policy?

AT: Well, I mean, the world could do things like Americans do, which is, exactly, impose export controls. I saw rumors on Bloomberg this morning about China limiting tungsten supplies to the world market. You could sanction individual firms. So you could go after Elon Musk, you could go after Apple, you could go after the platform businesses. The EU has talked about this. China obviously knows that those would be two very sensitive firms whose business model is heavily dependent on China they could go after. And that would simply be an analog to, say, what the United States has attempted to do to Huawei, the Chinese cellular network business. So you could do that.

But every time you do that kind of move, when you attack an American business or you try to push your own exporters not to sell to the United States, the problem of demand is posed. And the fundamental reason why America has the leverage that it does over the world economy are the macro imbalances, whether you view those through the globe’s desire for American financial assets, the Pettis view, or you view it from the mercantilist industrial production side, which would be that Germany, China, or the oil-exporting states, you know, pump more production into the world than they domestically consume. And that has to be absorbed by global markets.

And in those global markets, it’s not one-to-one, America doesn’t buy any oil from the Gulf, but America acts as a pump in the global demand system in a way that sustains the entire system. And that’s the fundamental problem. And it’s a good challenge. Ideally, it would be a good problem to have, right? This is the reason why Europe should be doing a debt-financed, large-scale fiscal program. And it should combine that with sanctions against the United States to offset the damage that you expect exporters will suffer in a trade war. This is the sort of thing America does, right? When it does this protectionism, it’s on the premise that the domestic economy is running super hot, so you can take the pain in the distributional struggle, it’s not the end of the world. But that is what you would have to do.

So for America’s antagonists in this trade-war situation, you can hurt the few American firms that really do operate transnationally and globally, you can limit your own exports to the United States, but if you’re going to do that, you then have to ensure that this isn’t ultimately just a huge loss of demand for your producers, which requires you to do an accommodating fiscal policy, and which is why people like the economist Michael Pettis, I think in entirely good faith, say, “This is going to be a wrench, but in the end, it’ll be good for everyone.” You know, it’s an analysis that derives from Hobson, the radical liberal from Britain—that these imbalances are very much to the detriment of the working class in Germany and the working class in China. And so a rebalancing would be good for, arguably in the long run, it’ll be good for everyone except the capitalist elite, the finance interest in the United States, and the corporate interests in Germany and China. They’re the group that really benefits from this unequal exchange.

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Cameron Abadi is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy. X: @CameronAbadi

Adam Tooze is a columnist at Foreign Policy and a history professor and the director of the European Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of Chartbook, a newsletter on economics, geopolitics, and history. X: @adam_tooze

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Prime Minister Viktor Orban has announced plans to disclose foreign funding to organizations that undermine his government

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The Fed, after complaining about missing immigrants in labor market data, now has further support for its pivot to wait-and-see.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

We’ve been discussing this issue – and its impact on employment data – since April after the Congressional Budget Office came out with estimates of actual population growth that included the huge wave of recent immigrants that wasn’t included in the Census Bureau’s population data, and thereby wasn’t included in the employment data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which extrapolates its household survey data to the population estimates from the Census Bureau.

Because many of the newly arrived immigrants, legal or illegal, are either working or looking for work, employment and labor force data were understated because they didn’t reflect those immigrants.

In December, the Census Bureau released its annual revisions that finally included this population growth of 8 million people over the past three years. So we knew that the annual adjustments by the BLS to its household survey data of employment and the labor force would produce a massive spike in January.

The BLS sticks the entire population adjustments to the household survey data into January, which created a spike of employment (+2.23 million in January from December) and a spike of the labor force (+2.20 million in January from December) that correct for several years of understatement. The BLS doesn’t revise backwards its household survey data with that population data. These adjustments, up and down, lumped into one month, happen every year, but this year they’re huge.

Total employment spiked by 2.23 million in January from December, to 163.9 million, reflecting the adjustment in the household survey data for the massive wave of immigrants, legal and illegal, over the past years.

The household survey includes workers who are excluded from nonfarm payrolls reported by establishments, such as self-employed workers whose businesses are not incorporated, farm workers, and private household workers. So, total employment as depicted by the household survey is typically 6-8 million workers higher than nonfarm payrolls.

Because of the understatement of total employment in the household survey data over the past few years, that difference between total employment and nonfarm employment shrank to just 2.7 million workers in December.

Today, the huge upward adjustment to total employment and the previously announced downward revisions of nonfarm employment (more in a moment) caused the difference to increase to 4.83 million.

This chart shows that disconnect over the past two years between total employment (red) and nonfarm employment (as revised, blue), and how it reverted to pre-pandemic trend in January:

This is how the spread between total employment in the household survey and nonfarm payrolls from the establishment survey shrank from 6-7 million before the pandemic to 2.7 million in December, and how it reverted to pre-pandemic trend in January (blue line):

The Labor Force spiked by 2.20 million people in January from December, to 170.7 million people, reflecting the adjustment for the massive wave of legal and illegal immigrants in 2021-2024 that have joined the labor force but that were not included in the Census Bureau’s population data that the BLS uses.

The labor force includes total employment plus the people who were actively looking for a job during the survey period but didn’t have a job.

Unemployment fell by 37,000 to 6.85 million people who were actively looking for a job during the survey period, the lowest since June 2024, according to the adjusted household survey data today.

The unemployment rate (U-3) declined to 4.0% In January, the lowest since May. The unemployment rate is defined as total unemployment divided by the labor force. Both, total unemployment and the labor force were adjusted for January to reflect the wave of immigration, which caused the unemployment rate to be slightly lower than it had been reported late last year.

This unemployment rate of 4.0% is historically low, as the long view shows, depicting a solid labor market, and well below the Fed’s median projection in its Summary of Economic Projections at the December meeting: For the end of 2024, the median projection dipped to 4.2%, and for the end of 2025, it dipped to 4.3%:

Nonfarm payrolls rose by 143,000 in January from December, to 159.1 million. November’s job growth was revised up by 49,000 to 261,000; and December was revised up by 51,000 to 307,000, according to the BLS today (blue in the chart below).

The three-month average job growth, including the revisions, was 237,000 per month, the highest since March 2023, and at the high end of the pre-pandemic range (red).

The three-month average also shows the Fed’s panic moment when it kept declining in 2024 and finally dropped to only 82,000 jobs created in August, which caused the Fed to cut by 50 basis points at the September meeting.

The nonfarm jobs revisions, whose preliminary estimates had been announced in August by the BLS as a lumpsum figure for the period from April 2023 through March 2024, were applied in today’s release to each month going back to the beginning of 2023. Per today’s release:

• Job creation in 2024 revised lower by 236,000 jobs to 2.00 million jobs created.
• Job creation in 2023 revised lower by 419,000 jobs to 2.59 million jobs created.

This chart shows the revised monthly nonfarm jobs (red) through January and the previously reported data through December (blue). Even the revised nonfarm jobs data depicts a solid labor market.

Average hourly earnings in January jumped by 0.48% (5.9% annualized), the biggest increase since June 2023. And the prior three months were revised higher.

This caused the three-month average to accelerate to +4.5% annualized (red):

Average hourly earnings year-over-year were also revised higher going back to mid-2024 and in January rose by 4.1%, the fourth month in a row above 4%.

The Fed complained about the lack of immigration data in the labor market figures, lamenting that it has to make policy decisions based on employment data that didn’t include the massive wave of immigrants, and having to wait for a long time before the adjustments and revisions are made.

Fed governor Michelle Bowman, in a speech a week ago, was one of the latest, exhorting government agencies to provide more accurate immigration data on a timelier basis. This is what the said:

“I hope the revision of the Bureau of Labor Statistics labor data, which will be released next week, will more accurately capture the changing dynamics of immigration and net business creation and bring more clarity on the underlying pace of job growth.

“It is crucial that U.S. official data accurately capture structural changes in labor markets in real time, such as those in recent years, so we can more confidently rely on these data for monetary and economic policymaking.

“In the meantime, given conflicting economic signals, measurement challenges, and significant data revisions, I remain cautious about taking signal from only a limited set of real-time data releases.”

With these revisions of employment and unemployment data, the Fed now has further support for its pivot to wait-and-see, with the revised unemployment rate at 4.0%, well below the Fed’s projections; with nonfarm job growth solid, particularly over the past three months (+237,000 on average); and with average hourly wages growing at a faster rate (+4.5% three-month average annualized, +4.1% year-over-year) than previously reported.

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The post Huge Upward Adjustment to Employment & Labor Force as Wave of Immigrants is Finally Included, Unemployment Drops, Wage Growth Accelerates: The Annual Revisions Are Here appeared first on Energy News Beat.

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PV Power said in a statement that the plant generated 50 MW of electricity as part of its testing phase.

According to PetroVietnam’s unit, the LNG power plant is expected to start commercial operation in July this year, after meeting technical requirements.

Last week, PV Power said that the LNG power plant had completed the no-load operation test at 3000 rpm and was ready to be connected to the grid for the first time on February 1.

Earlier in January, PV Power fired up its Nhon Trach 3 LNG power plant.

In November 2021, PV Power broke ground on the Nhon Trach 3 and 4 plants in the southern province of Dong Nai, which are worth about $1.4 billion.

Vietnam’s first LNG power plants will have a total capacity of 1.5 GW.

South Korea’s Samsung C&T secured a contract from PV Power to build the plants in a consortium with Vietnamese contractor Lilama.

PV Power previously said the launch of these LNG plants had been delayed due to several issues, including those related to the project’s land lease and the power purchase agreement with Vietnam’s power utility EVN, which was signed in October last year.

By the end of January 2025, the total construction progress of Nhon Trach 3 and 4 projects had reached nearly 96 percent, according to the firm.

PV Power said it is working to accelerate the progress and put both plants into operation in 2025.

PV Power and PV Gas are still working to sign the final gas supply agreement for these plants.

The two firms are taking the final steps to sign the GSA, ensuring a long-term and stable gas source for future operations, PV Power said.

In November last year, PV Gas signed a contract with PV Power to supply the commissioning LNG cargo for the latter’s Nhon Trach 3 and Nhon Trach 4 power plants.

PV Gas launched its Thi Vai LNG terminal on October 29, 2023, after nearly 4 years of construction and commissioning.

This is Vietnam’s first LNG import terminal.

PV Gas is also working to increase the capacity of the facility to 3 mtpa-

Source: Lngprime.com

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The agency said in its weekly report, citing shipping data provided by Bloomberg Finance, that the total capacity of these 29 LNG vessels is 110 Bcf.

This compares to 24 shipments and 90 Bcf in the week ending January 29.

According to data from S&P Global Commodity Insights, average natural gas deliveries to US LNG export terminals increased 1.5 Bcf/d from last week to 15.2 Bcf/d.

Natural gas deliveries to terminals in South Louisiana increased by 2.9 percent (0.3 Bcf/d) to 9.5 Bcf/d, and natural gas deliveries to terminals in South Texas increased by 35.5 percent (1.2 Bcf/d) to 4.4 Bcf/d.

Natural gas deliveries to terminals outside the Gulf Coast increased by 7 percent (0.1 Bcf/d) to 1.2 Bcf/d this week.

During the week under review, Cheniere’s Sabine Pass plant shipped ten LNG cargoes, and the company’s Corpus Christi facility sent four shipments.

Moreover, the Freeport LNG terminal shipped five cargoes this week.

Sempra Infrastructure’s Cameron LNG terminal sent four shipments, while Venture Global LNG’s Calcasieu Pass and Plaquemines LNG terminals each shipped two shipments.

In addition, the Cove Point facility and the Elba Island facility each shipped one cargo during the week under review.

EIA said that the Henry Hub spot price decreased 7 cents from $3.29 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) last Wednesday to $3.22/MMBtu this Wednesday.

The March 2025 NYMEX contract price increased to $3.360/MMBtu, up 19 cents from last Wednesday to this Wednesday.

EIA said the price of the 12-month strip averaging March 2025 through February 2026 futures contracts rose 9 cents to $3.905/MMBtu.

The agency said that international natural gas futures increased this report week.

Bloomberg Finance reported that average front-month futures prices for LNG cargoes in East Asia increased 32 cents to a weekly average of $14.40/MMBtu.

Natural gas futures for delivery at the Title Transfer Facility (TTF) in the Netherlands increased $1 to a weekly average of $16.08/MMBtu.

EIA said the weekly average TTF price has been above the weekly average East Asia price since January 13 of this year.

In the same week last year (week ending February 7, 2024), the prices were $9.46/MMBtu in East Asia and $9.07/MMBtu at TTF, it said.

Source: Lngprime.com

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The post US LNG exports climb to 29 cargoes appeared first on Energy News Beat.

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Harvest Alaska said on Thursday it has signed a deal with Marathon Petroleum (MPC) and Chugach Electric Association to bolster Southcentral Alaska’s energy supplies through Harvest’s acquisition and re-development of the existing Kenai LNG terminal, currently owned by MPC’s Trans-Foreland Pipeline.

The project is designed to repurpose existing assets to enable the timely delivery of additional natural gas supplies to the Southcentral market as early as 2026, with full-scale operations beginning as early as 2028, according to Harvest.

Under the proposal, Harvest would own, develop, and operate the LNG terminal and infrastructure – allowing Chugach, MPC, and any other Railbelt customers to secure additional natural gas supplies to help meet the market demand, the firm said.

Back in August 2022, MPC’s Trans-Foreland Pipeline won more time from US regulators to bring the closed Kenai LNG export plant in Alaska back online as an import facility.

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted an extension of time until and including December 17, 2025 to complete and place into service the project.

FERC authorized Trans-Foreland on December 17, 2020 to launch the LNG import facility in two years.

Moreover, Trans-Foreland plans to construct, modify, and operate new facilities for the import of LNG at its existing Kenai LNG export terminal in Nikiski, Kenai Peninsula Borough, and deliver the fuel to its Kenai refinery adjacent to the plant.

The Kenai LNG cool-down project would allow the plant to provide up to 7 million standard cubic feet per day of gas.

Harvest said the project leverages MPC’s legacy LNG export infrastructure to alleviate the potential short-term natural gas shortage facing Southcentral Alaska.

The facility includes existing dock infrastructure, which was historically capable of handling LNG vessels up to 138,000 cubic meters (approximately 2.9 billion cubic feet of natural gas), as well as onsite tankage with a storage capacity of 107,000 cubic meters (approximately 2.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas).

This infrastructure, combined with existing FERC approvals, positions the facility to meet near-term energy needs while longer-term alternatives are developed, Harvest said.

“By repurposing Marathon’s existing LNG facility, we aim to provide certainty to the Southcentral gas market while meeting the needs of Railbelt utilities,” Harvest CEO Jason Rebrook said.

Chugach is in discussions with Harvest to utilize the Kenai LNG facility and to have a potential solution to meet the gas needs of its members.

“We’ve been looking at options to fill the gap left by our expiring Hilcorp contract, which ends on March 31, 2028,” Chugach CEO Arthur Miller said.

“We look forward to ongoing discussions and analysis with Harvest Alaska as they progress the front-end engineering and design study over the next several months,” he said.

Moreover, Bruce Jackman, vice president of MPC’s Kenai refinery said the company believes the Kenai LNG terminal offers the “quickest and lowest-cost solution” to bring additional natural gas to Southcentral Alaska and beyond.

“Our Kenai refinery employees work around the clock to provide gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel to their fellow Alaskans, and a reliable supply of natural gas is critical to the refinery’s operations,” he said.

Source: Lngprime.com

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The post Harvest, Marathon Petroleum revive Kenai LNG import plans appeared first on Energy News Beat.